According to recent studies, international human rights treaties are ineffective, counterproductive, or else beneficial for only those countries that tend to respect human rights regardless of treaty membership. Analysts often attribute gaps between human rights principles and practices to willful disobedience, self-interested defection, and ineffective enforcement. Using two-stage regression models to analyze compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, I examine whether countries' inability (as opposed to unwillingness) to implement treaty terms is also responsible for the gap between commitment and compliance. I find that one dimension of state capacity in particular—bureaucratic efficacy—enhances levels of compliance with civil, political, and physical integrity rights provisions. These findings lend credence to an important aspect of the managerial approach—that noncompliance is often inadvertent and conditioned by a state's ability to implement treaty terms.

Taking the example of the liberalization of the electricity supply industy, I analyze member-state negotiations in the European Union (EU). Confronting central tenets of the intergovernmental approach, I suggest that member-state executives act within the limits of bounded rationality and do not always hold clear and fixed preferences. I focus on the large member states Germany, France, and the United Kingdom and identify four institutional mechanisms that support outcomes above the least common denominator: (1) the role of norms that constrain strategic action and frame the negotiations, (2) the empowerment of supranational actors, (3) the decision routines of the Council of the European Union that provide standardized mechanisms for resolving conflicts and induce policy learning and preference changes, and (4) the vertical differentiation within the Council system that can unblock issue-specific controversies. Even if as a result of these techniques EU legal acts contain several flexibilization elements, they can trigger behavioral changes that clearly surpass their regulatory content.

When it comes to linkages between migration and the global allocation of foreign development assistance, the size of the immigrant population from a recipient country residing in a donor country is an important determinant of dyadic aid commitments. Two complementary hypotheses probe this relationship. First, donors use foreign aid to achieve their broader immigration goals, targeting migrant-sending areas to increase development and decrease the demand for entry into the donor country. Second, migrants already residing in the donor country mobilize to lobby for additional aid for their homeland. Empirical tests on a large sample of country pairs made up of twenty-two donors and more than 150 recipients over the period 1993 to 2008 show robust support for these hypotheses.

Scholars have found an association between membership in regional intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and democracy, and IGO enforcement is often credited as an important factor explaining this link. But empirical evidence reveals great variation in whether these organizations actually respond to violations of democratic norms, even in democratic regions. Why do IGOs punish some norm-violating countries but not others? What does this variation imply for theories about how IGO membership helps states make credible commitments? This article presents a theoretical framework for understanding variation in multilateral norm enforcement. It identifies two obstacles to enforcement—the presence of competing geopolitical interests and uncertainty about the nature and scope of norm violations—and it argues that international monitoring can help mitigate these obstacles by revealing and publicizing information that pressures reluctant member states to support enforcement. An original data set of democracy enforcement in Latin America and postcommunist countries is used to examine regional IGO enforcement in response to one prevalent type of democratic norm violation: electoral misconduct. I find that enforcement is less likely in countries of high geopolitical importance, but the presence of election observers increases the probability of enforcement, and the content of observers' reports influences the type of enforcement that is imposed. These findings suggest that the link between IGO membership, credible commitments, and democracy should be theorized and tested as a conditional relationship, depending on country- and incident-specific factors that influence the likelihood of enforcement.

This article contrasts the effects of state-controlled oil revenues and privately controlled labor remittances on institutional development, state capacity, and businessgovernment relations in Saudi Arabia and the Yemen Arab Republic. These two countries represent extreme cases of dependence on external capital in deeply divided societies presided over by fragile, emerging bureaucracies. By tracing the two cases through a pattern of economic boom (1973-83) and recession (1983-87), the study demonstrates that the type, volume, and control of capital inflows decisively influence the relative development of the bureaucracy's extractive, distributive, and regulatory capacities and affect the ability of the state to respond to economic crisis. In both cases, external capital inflows precipitated the decline of extractive institutions. However, oil revenues and labor remittances had divergent effects on businessgovernment relations, and this circumscribed the state's ability to implement austerity programs during the recession. During the crisis, the Saudi government's efforts to cut subsidies to the private sector and to implement extractive policies were blocked by the state-sponsored merchant class. In contrast, the Yemeni government instituted a thoroughgoing austerity package that targeted the independent merchant class. In both cases, external capital inflows did not augment the efficacy of those that controlled them. These paradoxical outcomes are explained by tracing the different effects of oil revenues and labor remittances on the distribution of economic opportunity in the public and private sectors and the resulting effects on the regional, tribal, and sectarian composition of the bureaucracy and the commercial class.

Policy-makers and political scientists have long believed that states must make policy with an eye to maintaining a good reputation, especially a good reputation for resolve. Recent work, however, has argued that reputations for resolve do not form, and hence that past actions do not influence observers' behavior in subsequent interactions. This conclusion is theoretically problematic and unsupported by the evidence offered by reputation critics. In particular, juxtaposing reputation for resolve to power and interests is misleading when past actions influence observers' beliefs about interests, while the common approach of looking at crisis decision making misses the impact of reputation on general deterrence. We thus derive hypotheses about conflict onset from both the arguments of reputation critics and the logic of more standard reputation arguments, which we put to statistical test. We find that past action is closely connected to subsequent dispute initiation and that the effects of reputation generalize beyond the immediate circumstances of the past dispute. Although reputation is not all-important, leaders are well advised to consider the reputational implications of policy decisions in international conflict.

Are international courts power-seeking by nature, expanding the reach and scope of international rules and the courts' authority where permissive conditions allow? Or, does expansionist lawmaking require special nurturing? We investigate the relative influences of nature versus nurture by comparing expansionist lawmaking in the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the Andean Tribunal of Justice (ATJ), the ECJ's jurisdictional cousin and the third most active international court. We argue that international judges are more likely to become expansionist lawmakers where they are supported by substate interlocutors and compliance constituencies, including government officials, advocacy networks, national judges, and administrative agencies. This comparison of two structurally identical international courts calls into question prevailing explanations of ECJ lawmaking, and it suggests that prevailing scholarship puts too much emphasis on the self-interested power-seeking of judges, the importance of institutional design features, and the preferences of governments to explain lawmaking by international courts.

The end of the cold war has signaled a dramatic increase in the number and forms of United Nations (UN) intervention into ongoing conflicts. Yet, this larger UN role has not always translated into success. Short-term failures are evident, but the long-term effects of UN efforts are not readily apparent. We explore this longer-term impact by examining the incidence of recurring conflict between state dyads following a crisis. Overall, UN intervention has proved ineffective in inhibiting, delaying, or lessening the severity of future conflicts, independent of the level of violence in the precipitating crisis, the relative capabilities of the two states, the states' history of conflict, and the form of crisis outcome; nor were UN efforts successful in deterring future conflict. These sobering results suggest that changes in long-term strategy may be in order.

Analyses of international policy cooperation are often marked by analytic and empirical confusion. First, by largely treating cooperation as a binary phenomenon (typically, as cooperation versus defection), they direct attention away from crucial issues of distribution, the possibility of suboptimal cooperation, and the degree of unrealized joint gains. Second, even when simple matrix games with known payoffs capture distributional conflict and Pareto-inferiority, they typically do so by suppressing the inherent uncertainty and the need to learn, especially with respect to payoffs and values. And, third, even when they take both power and knowledge-dependent joint gains into account, they often treat the two as competing alternatives or as analytically separable, rather than as inherently bound together in the bargaining process. This article describes the emerging negotiation-analytic approach and argues that it provides a useful framework within which these conceptual problems can be avoided and explanatory power can be enhanced. From a negotiation-analytic perspective, it argues, epistemic communities can be viewed as distinctive de facto natural coalitions of “believers” whose main interest lies not in meeting material objectives but, rather, in expanding to become winning coalitions capable of ensuring the adoption of specific policy projects. An epistemic community's actions can thus be understood as changing the perceived zone of possible agreement through well-understood ways that are favorable to its objectives. Although ultimately a community's influence is exercised through bargaining, there is practically no theory of bargaining elaborated in the epistemic communities approach. Despite this and other drawbacks, the approach helps account for players' interests and usefully insists on the importance of perceptions and learning in negotiation. The article concludes that the effects of shared beliefs and of policy conflict can be readily incorporated into the negotiation-analytic model of bargaining, thereby giving rise to more precisely drawn observations about the conditions under which “believers” will have the strongest impact on negotiated outcomes. This will in turn make it possible to improve policy prescriptions in the actual or potential presence of epistemic communities.

Much scholarship in the political economy literature has investigated the influence of the democratic advantage on sovereign bond ratings by credit rating agencies (CRAs). Missing from earlier work, however, is inquiry into the effects on bond ratings of factors that lower political risk, such as adherence to the rule of law, the presence of a strong and independent judicial system, and protection of property rights. Using panel data for up to thirty-six developing countries from 1996 to 2006, we find that rule of law, strong and independent courts, and protection of property rights have significant positive effects on bond ratings. Policymakers wanting to obtain higher bond ratings and increased revenue from bond sales would do well to heed the message contained in these findings.

This article provides a concluding comment on the symposium focusing on Donald P. Green, Soo Yeon Kim, and David H. Yoon's “Dirty Pool.” Although the perspectives offered by the three sets of authors participating in the symposium differ starkly, my view (supported by conversations with the authors and additional analyses and debates among all involved) is that there is now a large area of underlying agreement. I describe this agreement by first illuminating Green, Kim, and Yoon's fundamental contribution in understanding and high lighting the role of heterogeneity in dyad-level studies of international conflict. I then describe the limitations in their revised analytic strategy, including those raised by John R. Oneal and Bruce Russett and by Nathaniel Beck and Jonathan N. Katz. I also offer suggestions for future researchers, methodologists, and data collectors.

The UN's sanctions against Libya became an issue of great controversy in the Security Council in the 1990s owing to competing interpretations of the central legal norms of international relations. The norms of due process, the presumption of innocence, and respect for international organizations (IOs) were defended by both sides, but for opposite ends. I use the contestation over norms and law at the Council to argue three broader themes about international politics: first, that states' perceptions about the legitimacy of international institutions is important in influencing state behavior; second, that this legitimacy creates powerful symbols in international relations that are strategically useful to states in the pursuit of their interests; and third, that the distribution of material power among states does not necessarily parallel the distribution of symbolic power, and so it is not uncommon for apparently strong states to be defeated by apparently weak ones when they fight over symbolic stakes. The norms of liberal internationalism are intersubjective resources useful in the strategic competition among states.For helpful comments on earlier drafts, I wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of this journal, as well as Jose Alvarez, Stephen Brooks, Michael Doyle, Daryl Press, Henry Shue, Benjamin Valentino, Jennifer Welsh, William Wohlforth, and seminar participants at Columbia Law School, Dartmouth College, Oxford University, and ISA Montreal 2004.

Although scholars have made considerable progress on a number of important research questions by relaxing assumptions commonly used to divide political science into subfields, rigid boundaries remain in some contexts. In this essay, we suggest that the assumption that international politics is characterized by anarchy whereas domestic politics is characterized by hierarchy continues to divide research on the conditions under which governments are constrained by courts, international or domestic. We contend that we will learn more about the process by which courts constrain governments, and do so more quickly, if we relax the assumption and recognize the substantial similarities between domestic and international research on this topic. We review four recent books that highlight contemporary theories of the extent to which domestic and international law binds states, and discuss whether a rigid boundary between international and domestic scholarship can be sustained on either theoretical or empirical grounds.

In typical crisis bargaining models, strong actors must convince the opponent that they are not bluffing and the only way to do so is through costly signaling. However, in a war, strong actors can benefit from tactical surprise when their opponent mistakenly believes that they are weak. This creates contradictory incentives during the pre-war crisis: actors want to persuade the opponent of their strength to gain a better deal but, should war break out, they would rather have the opponent believe they are weak. I present an ultimatum crisis bargaining model that incorporates this dilemma and show that a strong actor may feign weakness during the bargaining phase. This implies that (1) absence of a costly signal is not an unambiguous revelation of weakness, (2) the problem of uncertainty is worse because the only actor with incentives to overcome it may be unwilling to do so, and (3) because of the difficulty with concealing resolve, democracies might be seriously disadvantaged in a crisis.

Using the infinitely repeated prisoners' dilemma game as a modeling platform, we examine how domestic political institutions affect the ability of nations to trust and cooperate with each other. We propose a strategy, the agent-specific grim trigger, in which national leaders direct punishments for past defections at the leader of the nation responsible rather than at the nation itself. Leaders refuse to cooperate with those leaders who have cheated them in the past. However, by being prepared to cooperate with new leaders, cooperation can be restored. The focus of punishment on specific agents of the people (leaders), rather than the nation itself, means that citizens want to remove leaders who defect. Hence, domestically accountable leaders pay audience costs for failing to cooperate. These costs make accountable leaders more trustworthy and foster greater cooperation. In contrast, when replacing leaders is difficult, cooperation is less robust; and once cooperation falters, agent-specific punishment policies often lead to prolonged hostilities and periods of acrimonious relations between states.

We apply insights from “new, new” trade theory to explain a puzzling decline in US firm antidumping (AD) filings in an era of persistent foreign currency undervaluations and increasing import competition. Firms exhibit heterogeneity both within and across industries regarding foreign direct investment (FDI). We propose that firms making vertical or resource-seeking investments abroad will be less likely to file AD petitions, and firms are likely to undertake vertical FDI in the context of currency undervaluation. Hence, we argue, the increasing vertical FDI of US firms makes trade disputes far less likely. We use firm-level data to examine the universe of US manufacturing firms and find that AD filers generally conduct no intrafirm trade with filed-against countries. We also find that persistent currency undervaluation is associated over time with increased vertical FDI and intrafirm trade by US multinational corporations (MNCs) in the undervaluing country. Among larger US MNCs, the likelihood of an AD filing is negatively associated with increases in intrafirm trade. In the context of currency undervaluation, we confirm the existing finding that undervaluation is associated with more AD filings. We also find, however, that high levels of intrafirm imports from countries with undervalued currencies significantly decrease the likelihood of AD filings. Our study highlights the centrality of firm heterogeneity in international trade and investment in understanding political mobilization over international economic policy.

With the end of the Cold War, many observers expected that international conflict would be less likely to occur and easier to manage. Given the successful resolution of the Gulf War and the European Community's (EC) efforts to develop a common foreign policy, observers expected international cooperation to manage the few conflicts that might break out. Instead, the disintegration of Yugoslavia contradicted these expectations. Rather than developing a common foreign policy, European states were divided over how to deal with Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. Germany pushed for relatively quick recognition of Croatia and Slovenia, whereas other members of the EC wanted to go slower. Some observers expected Russia to fall in line with the West because of its need for investment and trade, but instead it supported Serbia. It is puzzling that Europe failed to cooperate regardless of whether greater international cooperation could have managed this conflict. How can we make sense of the international relations of Yugoslavia's demise? Since secession is not a new phenomenon, we should study previous secessionist conflicts to determine if they share certain dynamics, and we should consider applying to Yugoslavia the arguments developed to understand such conflicts.

Prevailing theories hold that U.S. public support for a war depends primarily on its degree of success, U.S. casualties, or conflict goals. Yet, research into the framing of foreign policy shows that public perceptions concerning each of these factors are often endogenous and malleable by elites. In this article, we argue that both elite rhetoric and the situation on the ground in the conflict affect public opinion, but the qualities that make such information persuasive vary over time and with circumstances. Early in a conflict, elites (especially the president) have an informational advantage that renders public perceptions of “reality” very elastic. As events unfold and as the public gathers more information, this elasticity recedes, allowing alternative frames to challenge the administration's preferred frame. We predict that over time the marginal impact of elite rhetoric and reality will decrease, although a sustained change in events may eventually restore their influence. We test our argument through a content analysis of news coverage of the Iraq war from 2003 through 2007, an original survey of public attitudes regarding Iraq, and partially disaggregated data from more than 200 surveys of public opinion on the war.

The theory that a liberal international economic structure is associated positively, and a mercantilist structure negatively, with international security is widespread. But the case in favor of liberalism, and the case against mercantilism, are both one-sided, and the whole attempt to link economic structure to international security anyway overestimates the influence that economic structure has on the use of force. Political and military factors provide explanations more convincing than economic ones for the propensity of states to resort to, or refrain from, the use of force. Liberal and mercantilist structures each have both positive and negative impacts on the use of force, but these impacts become important only when they are complemented by noneconomic factors governing the use of force. Hence security grounds cannot be used convincingly either as a reason for maintaining the current liberal system or as a reason for opposing a shift toward a more mercantilist structure of international economic relations.

In this article we explore the relationship between the investments of multinational corporations (foreign direct investment) and income inequality in Mexico. We argue that Mexico's liberalization of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in the 1990s provides a natural experiment to test how FDI affects income inequality in a middle-income country. We use an instrumental variables approach as our identification strategy to mitigate problems of endogeneity and omitted variable bias. In an empirical test of the determinants of changes in income inequality from 1990 to 2000, we find that increased FDI inflows are associated with a decrease in income inequality within Mexico's thirty-two states.The authors would like to thank Lawrence Broz, John Freeman, Matt Gabel, Geoff Garrett, Quan Li, Eddy Malesky, Layna Mosley, Katie Ridgeway, Pablo Pinto, John Stringer, and Andy Sobel for comments and suggestions. Jacob Gerber and Mariana Medina provided excellent research assistance. Thanks also to Patricio Aroca Gonzalez for generously providing us with his data. We acknowledge the financial support of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy. Nate Jensen's contribution to this article was written as a Global Fellow at UCLA's International Institute.